Nine Steps to the Shed

Most every morning
it’s out the back door to step,
mug in one hand, curiosity in the other,
down to the first of nine
off-round uneven Caithness slabs
roughly the size and shape of mammoth’s footprints
that stomp across uneven, soggy grass
dividing house from shed,

And it’s true I feel myself following in the bulk
of something vast, patient, fissured —
the deep past, say, or the world yet undeclared —
on this short transition from one dwelling to another.

What’s down there today? A fresh splatter
from passing gull, faint stains of last week’s nosebleed,
the snail lurched sideways in its crunched house,
and something between an image and a phrase that earlier
fell on my bowed head in the shower:
plenty to be going on with!

Read more »

From Salon:

Fairy-tale weddings, searching for Prince Charming, or even for Mr. Big: It all seems so 1990s. These days, it's women, not men, who are reluctant to commit to marriage — with those who have committed regretting having done so — and they're writing about it all over the place. Earlier this summer, Sandra Tsing-Loh, in an essay about her divorce, came out against the “companionate marriage” in the Atlantic Monthly. Cristina Nehring blamed such bloodless arrangements for the bankrupt state of romance in “A Vindication of Love.” Only the profoundly unhip Caitlin Flanagan defended the institution in Time. (The upshot of her un-sexy argument? It's for the kids.)

Now “Eat Pray Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, who has an uncanny ability to produce books that speak (however irritatingly) to deep cultural undercurrents, has written about her own marital uncertainty. A story in Thursday's New York Times offers details about her new memoir, “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage,” which will be published by Viking in January. With the book's proposed print-run of 1 million copies (!), the cultural referendum on marriage we have been participating in for what feels like forever now promises not to end anytime soon. Ambivalence about marriage, you might say, is the new black. (Gilbert was not only ambivalent about marriage, she was also ambivalent about her book about marriage — she threw away a 500-page draft before, um, committing to “Committed.”)

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Here is an experiment you don’t want to try at home.

Show a toy — a doll, say, or a model boat — to a toddler and explain that it it’s something special you’ve had since you were little. Ask the child to be “very careful” with it. Hand over the toy, which appears to be in fine condition, except that you’ve secretly rigged it to break spectacularly as soon as the child handles it. When your precious toy falls apart, express regret by mildly saying, “Oh, my.” Then sit still and observe the child.

The point is not to permanently traumatize anyone — the researchers who performed this experiment quickly followed it with a ritual absolving the child of blame. But first, for 60 seconds after the toy broke, the psychologists recorded every reaction as the toddlers squirmed, avoided the experimenter’s gaze, hunched their shoulders, hugged themselves and covered their faces with their hands.

More here.

Zhang Jie. Self portrait. 2008.

More here and here.

Missing Girl Probably Raped

Over at Democracy Now, a discussion with Pervez Hoodbhoy, Frida Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg (including a video):

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about the atomic age. Sixty-four years ago this weekend, on August 6th and August 9th, 1945, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US military, thus launching the nuclear age. For more on this, we’re joined now by three guests.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physicist and disarmament activist, chair of the Physics Department at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, joining us from Washington, DC.

Here in our firehouse studio is Frida Berrigan, longtime peace activist, senior program associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Previously, she served for eight years at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. Her latest article appears at Tom Dispatch; it’s called “For the Sixty-Fourth Time: No More Nuclear War.”

And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream from California, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers that exposed the true story behind the US decision making in the Vietnam War. Over the next year, he plans to release segments of his memoir in order to reveal the true history of the American nuclear era. The first part appears at Truthdig and his website last week, called “Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years.”

Andrew Clark in the FT:

The Lantana hostel, 30 minutes’ drive from Seville, is one of the few places in the world where Daniel Barenboim, conductor, pianist and pathological over-achiever, feels sufficiently relaxed to put his feet up. Literally. As I am ushered into a sun-filled room, I see him lounging on a sofa at the far end, dressed down in a white polo-shirt and grey striped trousers, his bare feet perched on the coffee table. For the past eight years he has been coming to Lantana to work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he and the late Palestinian writer and philosopher Edward Said founded in 1999.

It is the day after a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio in Seville’s Teatro de la Maestranza – the culmination of an intensive two-week rehearsal period. Barenboim looks tired. The following morning he and a 103-strong entourage, ranging in age from 12 to mid-20s, will set off on a gruelling international tour, finishing next Friday and Saturday at the BBC Proms in London.

Barenboim, now 66, has been at the forefront of classical music for six decades. He gave his first piano recital at the age of seven in his native Argentina (three years later he and his family moved to Israel). At 17 he performed his first cycle of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, a feat he has repeated about 30 times around the world. Aged 20 and already fluent in five languages, he made his conducting debut in Israel, later becoming music director of the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony and the Berlin State Opera – the last of which remains his fiefdom, along with La Scala, Milan, where three years ago the post of maestro scaligero (master of La Scala) was created for him.

The music in Barenboim’s life never stops but in the West-Eastern Divan, named after a collection of Goethe poems evoking western awareness of eastern culture, it shares the limelight with political activism. He sees the orchestra as a model for dialogue in the Middle East – an example of how to break the wall of hatred between peoples.

My friend Shomial Ahmad over at NPR:

In Urdu, the word “laal” means red. The band Laal takes its name literally. In a newspaper parking lot in Lahore, Pakistan, about 200 fans wave dozens of red flags, symbols of the band’s Communist politics.

The group’s classical flutist wears a T-shirt with a picture of Che Guevara on a red star. The lead guitarist wears a buttoned-down crimson shirt.

In the damp night air, the audience claps along with the song “Umeed-E-Sehr,” or “hope of a new dawn.” It’s the title track to Laal’s debut album.

Taimur Rahman is Laal’s lead guitarist. He says the band’s songs have recently gained a new relevance.

“These are times of both hope and despair simultaneously,” he says, “and if you’re not talking politics, if you’re not talking social change, if you’re not trying to do something that goes beyond crass commercialization, then really people are saying, kind of, that this is not worth our time.”

It’s not uncommon for Pakistanis to sing poetry and use it in political protests. So when Pakistan’s first Communist rock band re-appropriated decades-old verses about hope, its songs became the soundtrack to Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement.

The interview with Dean Karlan is very good. The research paper on impact measurements can be found here. Over at the BBC (via Innovations for Poverty Action):

Academics have been trying to work out from the evidence whether microcredit does actually raise people's incomes.

But it's been hard to do a proper scientific survey, since you need to compare those who do get a loan with a control group of similar people who don't.

Dean Karlan, professor of economics at Yale University, has managed to do it – with a control group – in the Philippines. His results raise some serious questions about the effectiveness of microcredit in reducing poverty.

From The Guardian:

On Saturday 6 August 1763 James Boswell, then aged 22, boarded the Prince of Wales packet boat at Harwich, on the coast of Essex. The ship was bound for the Dutch port of Helvoetsluys; from there, Boswell travelled to the university town of Utrecht where, at the insistence of his father, he was to study law. He was being punished for his scandalous life in London – he'd lately converted to Catholicism and fathered an illegitimate son whom he would never see – but none of this quite explains his dismal mood in the days before he left for Holland. His friend and mentor Samuel Johnson found him agitated, gloomy and dejected as they shared the journey to Harwich. The elder man was moved to remark of a moth that burned itself to death in a candle flame: “That creature was its own tormenter, and I believe its name was Boswell.”

The reluctant scholar's spirits had sunk even lower by the time he reached Utrecht. He was not cheered by his lodgings, next door to the town's half-ruined cathedral, and “groaned with the idea of living all winter in so shocking a place”. He woke the next day in profound despair and ran out into the streets, convinced he was going mad. He groaned aloud as he turned from the cathedral square, cried out as he crossed the city's turbid canals and wept openly in the faces of passing strangers. In the weeks that followed, Boswell's letters traced a pitiful decline; to his friend William Temple, he described a wretchedness that, he insisted, nobody who had not suffered it could fully comprehend. “I have been melancholy,” he wrote, “to the most shocking and tormenting degree.”

More here.

From Science:

Nerds of the world, take heart. Brainy male birds have more luck with females than do their less-intelligent counterparts, according to a study of the Australian bowerbird. Researchers claim this is the first study to show a link between smarts and mating success in any species. It's hard to find a bird with a more complex and energetic courtship behavior than the bowerbird. At breeding season, males build a special platform, or bower, on the forest floor to lure females, and they decorate it with rare objects such as blue feathers and shiny bits of glass. They accompany this with varied vocalizations, hopping, and tail-bobbing.

These behaviors help male bowerbirds attract mates, but are the females also looking for a guy with brains? To find out, researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, mucked with about 30 bowers they found at Wallaby Creek in Australia. Graduate student Jason Keagy took advantage of males' dislike of having red objects in their bowers (they much prefer blue, apparently because of its rarity in natural settings). In one test, he placed a red plastic battery terminal cover in a bower and covered it with a transparent box that the birds had to tip and drag off; in another, he fixed red tiles in the bowers with screws, forcing the birds to try to cover them up with leaves and twigs. The team then used automated video cameras to monitor the bowers.

The best problem-solvers scored the most copulations, the team reports online this month in the journal Animal Behaviour.

More here.

“Loneliness is worst than deadliness.”
………………………………–Ali McMurti

Thieves in Mind

Crying she describes
how burglars wrecked the house
the wretches took her jewelry and raped
an old woman’s values.

Isn’t she happy?

It’s been years since any thief
set foot in my house
even for coffee.
I deliberately leave the pot unlocked.

On returning each time I pray
to find the door’s canines broken

the lights shaking as if just having knocked
against a tall earthquake’s head

to see the burial gifts stolen
from the mirror’s mummy kingdoms

as if someone had shaved in the bathroom
and whiskers had sprouted on my beardless touch
their refutation bound hand and foot on the floor

and, coming at its leisure from the kitchen, steam
from warm footprints with lots of cinnamon on top.

by Kiki Dimoula
translation: David Connoly

from: A Minute’s Licence; Published: “Poetry Greece 2”;
Summer 2000

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in the New York Times Magazine:

The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your children,’ ” recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.” Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

The word 'sinecure’ literally means 'without care’, and by the late 17th century it was already being used for a job with a salary but no real duties. So when Isaac Newton received a letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1696, offering him the post of Warden of the Mint, he had every reason to think that a sinecure was being dangled in front of him: the salary was £400 a year (four times his pay as a Cambridge professor), and the Chancellor assured him that the work could all be done in his spare time.

Newton accepted, and within a week he had moved out of Cambridge to take up residence in the Tower of London. Perhaps he was looking forward to a life 'without care’, to be devoted to the study of mathematics, physics and his other intellectual passions: alchemy and Biblical interpretation. If so, he was in for a shock when he discovered the scale of the task that awaited him.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

It is difficult to dispute that there is rising progressive anger over what the administration appears to be doing in the health care realm. Consider the remarkable, blog-based fund-raising campaign to embolden progressive House members who vowed a NO vote on any health care bill lacking a public option even if that’s the bill returned from conference reconciliation. If those House progressives adhere to their pledge, that would be an enormous impediment to the White House’s plans — and Kevin Drum astutely notes that the purpose of the fund-raising effort is to force the notoriously hapless, impotent and capitulating House progressives to adhere to their clear commitment (as The Hill put it yesterday: “House liberals have a history of getting rolled”). In just a few days, that campaign has raised more than $300,000. From what I can recall, that is the most prolific single-issue Internet fund-raising since the fundraising bonanza fueled by anger over the 2008 vote by Democrats (revealingly including Obama) to legalize Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program and retroactively immunize telecom lawbreakers.

If one were to analyze matters from a purely utilitarian perspective, one could find ways to justify the White House’s attempt to write a health care plan that accommodates the desires of the pharmaceutical and drug industries [mandates (i.e., 50 million forced new customers) plus government subsidies to pay their premiums plus no meaningful cost controls (i.e., no public option)]. All other things being equal, it’s better — from the White House’s political perspective — that those industries not spend vast sums of money trying to defeat Obama’s health care proposal, that they not pour their resources into the GOP’s 2010 midterm effort, that they not unleash their fully army of lobbyists and strategists to sabotage the Democratic Party. That’s the same calculating mindset that leads the White House to loyally serve the interests of the banking industry that caused the financial crisis (we don’t want to make enemies out of of Goldman Sachs or turn investment bankers into GOP funders). Indeed, that’s the same mindset that leads the White House to avoid any fights with the Right — and/or with the intelligence community and permanent military establishment — over Terrorism policies (there’s no political benefit to subjecting ourselves to accusations of being Soft on Terror and there’s plenty of reasons to cling to those executive powers of secrecy, detention and war-making).

In essence, this is the mindset of Rahm Emanuel, and its precepts are as toxic as they are familiar: The only calculation that matters is maximizing political power.

[H/t: Jyotsna Uppal]

Carmen Reinhart in VoxEU:

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. – Edward Gibbon

The economics profession has an unfortunate tendency to view recent experience in the narrow window provided by standard datasets. With a few notable exceptions, cross-country empirical studies of financial crises typically begin in 1980 and are limited in other important respects. Yet an event that is rare in a three-decade span may not be all that rare when placed in a broader context.

In a recent paper co-authored with Kenneth Rogoff, we introduce a comprehensive new historical database for studying debt and banking crises, inflation, currency crashes and debasements.3 The database covers sixty-six countries across all regions. The range of variables encompasses external and domestic debt, trade, GNP, inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices. The coverage spans eight centuries, going back to the date of independence or well into the colonial period for some countries.

In what follows, I sketch some of the highlights of the dataset, with special reference to the current conjuncture. We note that policymakers should not be overly cheered by the absence of major external defaults from 2003 to 2007, after the wave of defaults in the preceding two decades. Serial default remains the norm; major default episodes are typically spaced some years (or decades) apart, creating an illusion that “this time is different” among policymakers and investors. We also find that high inflation, currency crashes, and debasements often go hand-in-hand with default. Last, but not least, we find that historically, significant waves of increased capital mobility are often followed by a string of domestic banking crises.

More information on the book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, co-authored with Kenneth S. Rogoff can be found over at Princeton University Press.

An interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Q: In your confirmation hearing, you said you would put women’s issues at the core of American foreign policy. But as you know, in much of the world, gender equality is not accepted as a universal human right. How do you overcome that deep-seated cultural resistance?

Clinton: You have to recognize how deep-seated it is, but also reach an understanding of how without providing more rights and responsibilities for women, many of the goals we claim to pursue in our foreign policy are either unachievable or much harder to achieve.

Democracy means nothing if half the people can’t vote, or if their vote doesn’t count, or if their literacy rate is so low that the exercise of their vote is in question. Which is why when I travel, I do events with women, I talk about women’s rights, I meet with women activists, I raise women’s concerns with the leaders I’m talking to.

I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last great impediment to universal progress — that we have made progress on many other aspects of human nature that used to be discriminatory bars to people’s full participation. But in too many places and too many ways, the oppression of women stands as a stark reminder of how difficult it is to realize people’s full human potential.